Project Glass

Google Glass now has Pandora support, giving the wearable another option for streaming music playback. The new Glassware pipes Pandora's ever-changing custom radio playlists to the headset, complete with support for starting a new channel or picking from a preexisting one.

The idea of Glass doing face-recognition may not sit well with Google, but how about if the wearable could just give you a little more insight into how the person you're talking to is feeling? Fraunhofer IIS has loaded its SHORE emotion, age, and gender detection system straight onto Google's headset, giving real-time feedback on those around you.

When it comes to thieves and technology, the latter usually proves to be their biggest nemesis. Earlier this summer, for example, one thief was caught after logging into his Facebook account at the victim's home, then forgetting to log back out. The newest dumb criminal? A man who stole a pair of Google Glass and unknowingly broadcasted his day.

If using Google Glass through winks and similar discrete gestures are still a bit too obvious for your needs, a new offering from This Place will be right up your alley. MindRDR allows users, with the aid of some extra hardware, to control Glass with their minds.

Google is giving Glass a refresh, making the wearable faster and longer-lasting, though likely to infuriate early-adopters all the same as unlike before they won't be given the opportunity to swap to the new version. The new Glass will now have 2GB of memory - double the 1GB of RAM the current Explorer Edition model has - and the promise of around 15-percent longer battery life thanks to a combination of firmware released today and quietly-made hardware changes a few months back.

The 2014 edition of Google I/O is about to begin, but not before a whole new batch of apps for Google Glass can be launched. Starting this week, several new experiences will be brought to the Google Glass world, including Runtastic, GuidiGO, Duolingo, The Guardian, 94Fifty Basketball, Livestream, Goal.com, musiXmatch, Shazam, Star Chart, Allthecooks, and none other than Zombies, Run!

As the relentless Glass parodies show, Google's wearable still has a long way to go to engage the mainstream market, which might explain the latest push into more open-minded markets. Google has announced its first "Glass at Work Certified Partners", five companies looking to use the head-mounted device for doctors in hospitals, journalists in the field, and other highly-targeted cases.

The digital world is hungry for your eyeballs, and the tools we have to manage and mitigate those potential distractions and filter through the most valuable information are looking increasingly inadequate. How many times has your smartphone buzzed or beeped in your pocket in the last five minutes? The demands on our attention are only going to get more frequent, and it’s time for a new breed of notification to address that.

Glass has a perception problem, and a new segment on The Daily Show skewering the wearable probably isn't going to help any on that front. The divisive head-worn computer came in for some tough treatment from the comedy news show's Jason Jones, who not only questioned whether the spate of anti-Glass sentiment some have experienced over the past year actually counts as geek bullying, but tried to make his own version.

Google is aiming to make Glass even more of a hands-free wearable by adding contextual voice command support to the headset, allowing more complex series of instructions to be given without resorting to touchpad-swiping. A new aspect of Glass XE18.1, the updated firmware released earlier this week, the system should also make it easier for existing Android apps to be ported over to Glass.

The cinema chair Alamo Drafthouse, never one to tolerate errant technology use in the theater, has taken the first step for officially cracking down on Google Glass's presence during movies. From now on, Glass will have to be removed before the movie starts.

Has Glass gone off the boil? Google's wearable launched in Explorer beta form to great fanfare, but privacy concerns, criticisms of "Glasshole" arrogance, and legitimate doubts about the value of what it actually offers have left the headset on questionable ground. I love the idea of wearables but I don't often put Glass on any more, which got me thinking: what could Glass do to make it a must-wear?